Wild Horses (14 page)

Allison worked her first shift that evening, Saturday night in Coyote Ridge, Dickory Doc’s packed elbow to elbow, and thumping with country-western and blues-rock. Excluding that fateful Casino Night in Seattle, she’d not waitressed in seven years, but fell readily back into the routine, arms and legs and hands remembering how — the balance of a tray, the clinking weight of four longneck bottles dangling from each handful of splayed fingers. Drinks were simple, mostly beers and shots, and demand was high.

She learned faces, a few names, most reacting neutrally to her presence — beneath notice, or yet to prove her worth. She found herself soon involved in a case of mutual dislike with a fortyish woman named Loretta, all hips and swagger and ratted red hair. Of course she liked whiskey sours. Of course Allison didn’t make them properly. It wasn’t until Loretta lit a Marlboro and groped some cowboy’s thigh that Allison realized why she had disliked her on sight: Loretta was chipped from the same mold as Boyd’s atrocious and slack-tummied playmate from the casino.

Allison slept late the next day, then walked around Coyote Ridge to see what little else there was to see, strolling up and down the main drag peering into shop windows. The one surprise was the presence of a motorcycle dealership on the edge of town, near the diner … Coyote’s Paw Harley-Davidson. She gazed in at the showroom gleam of lacquer and chrome, wanting suddenly the feel of wind through her hair, just her and an iron horse. Red lettering stenciled across one plate-glass window read WE CARRY ST. JOHN’S APOCALYPSE, and she wondered what that meant.

In the center of town she found what she later supposed was destiny, the pen of the playwright in this from the beginning. A mere day and a half after attempted sodomy, it was no accident that she encountered the hunting gear shop. Wall racks bristled with the long barrels of rifles and shotguns.

Under the watch of the bald, sunburned proprietor, Allison perused the four glass cases full of revolvers and semiautomatic pistols. Lethal and invested with dire potential, they gleamed, they invited the fit of her hand.

“Can I see that one there?” she asked, and pointed, wondering how long it would take her to save enough to match the price tag.

Knowing suddenly that it was something she would have to do, that, wild horses or not, you could never ride far enough away as long as the worst wrongs remained unrighted. Because there was abuse, and there was therapy, and, finally, there was justice.

*

Boyd and Krystal packed for the road Sunday morning, picked up the posters from Kinko’s, and traded Vegas for the desert. As he’d not yet gotten around to repairing his windshield, they took Krystal’s car, a snazzy little Mazda the color of coral, with a five-CD changer in the stereo.

The idea was to cover, to a radius of a couple hundred miles, all the routes that Allison could have taken away from the city. Fortunately, these were few. The highway grid in and out of Las Vegas was a simple X, with a couple of secondary roads branching off the east half after several miles. The city’s isolation was, Boyd had heard, a major factor in discouraging armed heists of casinos. While it could be done, theoretically, overcoming the small army of casino security would still be the easy part. The true ordeal would be getting away from a city whose conduits could be shut down with a minimum of roadblocks.

They began with U.S. 95 to the northwest, on his guess that Allison might have intended to head back up to Seattle. Out here in the broiling wastelands, they would stop at small clusters of businesses that scratched out their livings catering to travelers, or at the true rogues who went at it alone, their gas stations or their cafés occupying a patch of ground like lonely homesteaders. Up the posters went, with staples or tape, and sometimes a crusty owner would demand to know what they thought they were doing, always softening when they saw Allison’s picture, and her fate. “She could die if we don’t find her,” Boyd would tell them, and they would relent and nod him toward some high-visibility area, wishing him luck, and by the time they got to Beatty, Krystal had become Allison’s dear hand-wringing sister.

“Some good job we did on this poster,” he said while they pulled back onto the highway. “It’s really getting to them, when they take the time to read it.”

“It’s not what it says, it’s the picture.” Krystal drove with one hand, waved a copy at him with the other. “It’s the picture that’s selling it to them. They like her on sight, most of these people — can’t you tell?”

Boyd shrugged, miffed. “Well, don’t forget who took the damn picture.”

“She
is
pretty,” said Krystal, “but there’s something else going on there. In her eyes, I mean, like something that goes way back.” Krystal nibbled at her lower lip, steered around the sun-dried remains of a dead dog. “Oh, that’s so sad.” Back to the photo. “Was she abused when she was young?”

“Say what?”

“When she was young, was she sexually abused?”

“No,” he said, almost defensively. “She would’ve told me something like that.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Krystal handed the poster back, staring at the road, the vanishing point on the horizon. “There’s a look sometimes, when that’s happened. It’s nothing you could, you know, measure, but it’s there. I have a client, a psychologist, he comes to Vegas on junkets with a bunch of other psychologists, and he once told me he could tell within the first two minutes of meeting a woman whether she’d been molested as a child or not.”

“That’s creepy.” Boyd put the poster back in the box, where he wouldn’t have to look at those staring eyes. Allison would have told him — wouldn’t she? “That shrink, did he say … I mean, what was his, um, impression of … of you?”

“A clean slate. Dad and my uncles and the neighbors, they all kept their hands to themselves.” Behind big dark sunglasses, she broke into a wide and beautiful grin. “He said I was goofy enough as it was, without that adding any more baggage.”

“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If he was wrong, if he missed something, you’d tell me?”

“Of course, you silly. We’re soulmates, it was in the cards. We can’t have any secrets.”

No secrets. She really believed this was the best policy, as surely as he believed he’d not yet heard the weirdest from her. They had decided the other night to impose a moratorium on further revelations, let the rest keep while they got to know each other better over the next few days, after which the riskier admissions could dribble free whenever the moment felt right. A good plan: It would allow him time to devise the proper spin on where this money they were chasing had come from. He wasn’t sure how Krystal was going to react, karmically speaking, although surely she could live with it if he was expected to overlook the call-girl thing.

And when he watched her sleep each night, he wondered if there wasn’t some miracle unique to Krystal. Her body and, while he had never given much thought to these things before, her soul.
Whore.
Say it — she was a whore. He could mouth the word above her in the moonlight but could not feel it connect, as though the word and all that it implied rinsed off her like rain. None of it could touch her, because she would not let it.

After blanketing U.S. 95 with posters, they took a couple of days for the south and southeast roads out of Vegas. Next they dropped down to southwest-bound I-15, the sterile pan of Southern California desert that he was really beginning to despise. Wicked L.A. karma shimmered on the horizon, and he knew he was going to have to fess up about skimming the casino eventually.

Laying preliminary groundwork. That was the trick.

“You do much gambling back there?” he asked her, Boyd driving now and finding that he could think better behind the wheel.

“A little.” She toyed with a pewter pendant shaped like a crescent moon and inset with fuchsia sugilite. “I’m in and out of hotels a lot, kind of, and I’ve got the cash right there, so…”

“You win, or lose, mostly?”

“Oh, lose. I know I’d do better if they’d just, like, quiet things down some. Everything’s so noisy, all those slot machine buzzers and bells, I can’t focus, my vibes get all screwy.”

“Yeah, they tend to count on that. How much do you lose?”

“Not much. Usually I’ll drop one or two hundred combined on the slots and the wheel of fortune, sometimes craps, before I come to my senses.”

“Stay away from the wheel, that one’s a sucker trap. Highest house advantage there is. Gambling for people without a frontal lobe. No offense.” He wagged a finger like a lecturer. “I’ll let you in on a hard reality not a lot of people even recognize. The reason the house always comes out ahead is because, with very few exceptions, even when you win they don’t pay off on the true odds you’re risking on your bet. When you lose they make money, and when you win, they still make money off you.”

He had her now. Krystal tucked her slim muscled legs beneath her on the seat, turning toward him as if learning she’d just been fleeced. “Like how?”

“Take the roulette wheel. That’s an easy one to explain. The American version has slots numbered one through thirty-six, plus zero and double-zero. Thirty-eight in all, right? Now suppose you and I are there at the table placing our bets. Forget the red and black, forget split bets, line bets, all that. Just a straight-up bet on one number. How old are you again?”

“Twenty-five. Come on, sweetie, get with the program. I’ve told you once already, you can’t remember it? For me?”

“I’m sorry, babe. Too many numbers in my head. I forget again and I’ll suck all ten of your toes in public.” She giggled; damage control was complete. “Let’s say we slap down an even ten dollars, straight up on twenty-five, one chance in thirty-eight of hitting. And we win, because your vibes are so strong the ball can’t help but drop right where it’s supposed to. So how much should we be getting back then?”

“Three hundred and eighty dollars.”

He shook his head. “Three-fifty. Roulette only pays off at thirty-five to one, and they keep the rest for themselves. So in the long run, if we play all night, they’ll still come out ahead.”

“That sucks! And they build this kind of advantage into every game?”

“Damn near. Only it’s not always so obvious, sometimes it’s hidden deeper in the game.” He glanced over to see her frowning at the injustice of it all. “So this is why, when people hear about a casino, any casino, taking a big loss, a hard hit in the wallet, this is why it makes their day. This is why the people that stick it to them are seen as, well … as heroes.”

“You can bet I’ll cheer louder for the next winners I see.” Krystal was turning this over, he could tell, seeking cause and effect. “The people that defy the odds, they’re like walking karma that comes back at the casinos to settle the score.”

“Krystal my love, you are
so
wise,” and he smiled because the world was so good to him it was almost embarrassing. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

*

Beginning their second day on the road, Krystal would, every few hours, use her cell phone to check her answering service. Since her phone had Automatic Call Following, a roaming feature that would link it with whatever satellite happened to be nearest overhead, they could make calls from practically anywhere.

Messages left about Allison were steady, and the follow-up procedure simple: Boyd would return the calls, question whoever had left them, and decide these people were insane. One of them had just seen Allison doing table-dances in Reno. A trucker had gotten a blowjob from her at an I-80 rest stop. One caller offered to find her for five hundred dollars a day plus expenses, while yet another had seen her doing local newscasts on TV in Idaho.

“Idaho has TV?” he said, and hung up. How discouraging. He’d not expected anyone to serve Allison up on a platter, but if they could at least get a handle on the direction she had gone, entire sections of the country could be eliminated.

“It was her, I’m quite sure of it,” another man guaranteed. Boyd rolled his eyes, almost telling him to stand in line with the other sure things, who wouldn’t have known Allison if she’d spat on them. “I won’t soon forget her.”

It was the end of the week now, and they were on their final stretch, papering I-15 from Vegas northeast across the tip of Arizona, into the high country of southwestern Utah. At midmorning they were taking a break at a rest stop, and Krystal had strayed off by herself. He could see her meditating in the lotus position atop a small hillock, against a backdrop of pines and wind-sculpted rock, everything dwarfed beneath wide blue sky. Sometimes he expected her to float right up into the clouds.

“She said her name was Allison, I remember that distinctly.” The man sounded as though he was using a cellular as well. The connection fuzzed and waned, came back again. “This medication she’s supposed to be taking — is it in part to curb violent mood swings?”

Boyd almost said no, then remembered the havoc Allison had wreaked on his car, his shoulder, Madeline’s cactus patch. “She needs a little help with that sometimes.”

“The last I saw of her was in Arizona, near a little town by the name of Coyote Ridge,” said the man, and the way he described her, how she looked, how she talked, left little doubt in Boyd that he finally had a genuine sighting. “If you find her again, it may be worth a sum of money to you for me to see her again, if we could arrange that. She’s caused me some … problems recently. Of course, this is something I’d want kept confidential between us.”